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Current
Upcoming Past |
Main Gallery January 10 to February 18, 2006 Dave Ostrem Reading Art Words and Pictures 1993 to 2005 |
Reception for the Artist Saturday January 14 3:00-6:00 pm Artist/Curator Talk at 4:00 pm Additional work will be on view at the Teck Gallery during the exhibition dates. |
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Dave Ostrem's paintings usually show us an artist at work in a
live-work studio space that is remarkably like the one that Ostrem
inhabits on Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Like Vermeer before him,
Ostrem incorporates a window into his paintings, but, unlike Vermeer,
Ostrem gives us the view from his window, not just the rosy glow from
the exterior world. Ostrem's view is of a Vancouver, or a Vancouver
look-alike, that seems to be suffering from a terrible bout of
flatness, even though his world is painted with brilliant hues
reminiscent of the primary colours in Mondrian's paintings. Each Ostrem
painting is a formal proposition about the structure of the world; his
ideas about structure would be familiar to Mondrian, and each version
of the artist-in-the-studio that he creates explores yet another
paradox of human existence in the modern world.
Dave Ostrem's painted world has a comic book appearance, but his ever-present invocation of research categories and subject-areas, as manifested on the spines of the thousands of books that inhabit his paintings, will remind viewers of Levi-Strauss's dictum that humans will only find names for those things that are truly important to them. Ostrem's paintings are a kind of universal catalogue of those areas of importance that, in turn, provide a context for the making of contemporary art. |
Dave Ostrem Reading Art 1978 Oil on Canvas 43 cm x 59 cm 
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